Virtue (22 page)

We’ve reached the D roads that lead from the C roads that lead from the B roads ten miles from Belhaven, and Harriet is driving the whole thing on gears. I’m not sure if she’s ever actually been shown where the brake is on this car. Or if she has, she thinks it’s something you use only in case of small children on the road. Approaching the half-mile of hairpin bends after the Soldier’s Downfall, she momentarily takes her foot off the gas, changes down into third, then hits the accelerator again to get a grip on the road. I close my eyes, hold my breath, and, when there is no sound of rending metal and I don’t find myself showered with shattered glass, open them again and say, ‘Oh, bugger.’

‘Yes. Sorry. I’m really sorry, Annie. And there was me thinking we would get a few days’ peace and quiet. Are you going to be okay? We could always go somewhere else and book into a hotel or something.’

‘No, old dear. Don’t worry about it. I’m sure we can dodge them most of the time.’

‘I should have thought,’ she says. ‘I don’t know if Gerald asked them, or they’re just there, but Mrs H says we should be okay if we stay in the Kennels. You know they never stray more than fifty yards from the drinks cupboard. She says she had a feeling I might be down soon and she’s made up the beds already.’

We scream round Old Nick’s Kneecap at sixty miles an hour and Harriet says ‘Sorry’ again, though I’m not sure this time whether she’s referring to her driving or the fact that her cousins have come to stay.

‘Can’t be helped,’ I reply, a phrase that I think probably covers both eventualities. ‘Who’s come down?’

‘Cair and Vif and Roof,’ she says, which after years of knowing her I have learned refers to the Honourable Caroline Moresby, the Honourable Veronica Sewell and Lord Rufus Byng. A lot of the upper classes, I have discovered, go by these Teletubby diminutives, as they’re so much easier to pronounce with hare lips and cleft palates. Harriet herself seems to be referred to as something like ‘Hairier’ among her kin.

‘Ah,’ I say. I’ve met Cair and Vif and Roof several times over the years, because somehow whenever we’ve made a dash for the relative peace and quiet of Belhaven, at least one of them has been in residence.

‘I really am sorry,’ Harriet apologises again.

‘Stop it, Harriet.’

‘Well, this is hardly going to be the break I promised you. I wanted you to have a chance to think things out, and now we’re going to be relly-dodging all week.’

I actually manage to smile at this. ‘It’s still going to be better than London at the moment,’ I reply. ‘Honestly. Thank you.’

Harriet – and I sort of wish she wouldn’t, because I feel unsafe enough as it is – smiles and takes a hand off the wheel to pat my knee. ‘You’re family,’ she says. ‘More family than my real family.’

‘Well,’ I say gloomily, ‘looks like you’re my
only
family.’

‘Chin up, monkey,’ she says, ‘one day you’ll look back at all this and laugh.’

Yeah, right. The screaming laugh of one in Bedlam, probably.

One-handed, she swerves round another corner, and Belhaven comes into view. It’s hard for it not to, really. Like all the great houses, Belhaven’s architecture owes as much to the desire to dominate the landscape and let everyone know just who the local boss-family is as any need to provide anything by way of fortification. It was built, as Carolyn would say, more for show than blow. Coming in on the Ipswich road, you begin to catch glimpses of the chimneys as far away as Much Hadham, popping out from behind the grand parkland trees that – there are those who would ascribe this to another Godiva-driven miracle – emerged unscathed from the Dutch elm epidemic. Her brief period of residence, after all, coincided with their survival, and lots of things can be construed as miracles if you’re looking for one.

Harriet starts to hum. The
William Tell
overture, though the theme from
The Lone Ranger
is probably a bit closer to the truth. Girding her loins for the joy of Moresbys en masse. I pick the Marlboros up from the dashboard and light one. I’ve decided, as a figure touched by tragedy, to take up chainsmoking; Camel Lights in the blue box sit in my pocket as I huddle in the passenger seat and stare through the window with scratchy eyes. I’m dressed from head to toe in black: black workman’s boots up on the seat, black socks, black trousers, black vest and a black silk Mao jacket. My face hurts. I’ve been crying for two days solidly and my skin feels dermabraded. People will mistake me for a friend of Elizabeth Taylor.

Henry, after two hours of vocal protest, has finally fallen asleep in his wire box on the back seat and twitches as he chases dream mice round a dream factory. ‘Better go up the back drive,’ mutters Harriet, and accelerates past the front gates and the signs for the coach park. The phantom decorators have been back, tying ribbons and bunches of flowers to the bars of the gates. I notice that the old Minnie Mouse dolls have made a reappearance. I’ve never got the Minnie Mouse thing. I mean, you can understand it when it’s a child that’s died, but why on earth would anyone think that a piece of Disney tat was a suitable memorial for a full-grown woman?

We follow the wall for another couple of miles, then swing in to the left and follow a Roman-straight one-track road through the woods. It’s empty, as always: the back drive is hardly used, even by the people on the estate; it leads down to the Kennels and the stables and the kitchen door, and everyone – guests, staff, tourists, VAT inspectors – in this democratic age, likes to think that they are approaching a great house as a cherished equal. If it weren’t for family, the back drive would never get used at all. You could drive down here in a psychedelic bus with loudspeakers playing
Sergeant Pepper
, and nobody but a few squirrels would notice.

Harriet suddenly swings the car over into a passing place and croaks on the handbrake. Henry wakes briefly, stands up, stretches his back, tail forming a perfect question mark, yawns and lies down again. ‘Got your towel?’ asks Harriet, hauling him from his nest and dropping him on the verge, where he sits, blinking, dividing his time between sniffing the air and looking indignant.

‘Somewhere in the boot.’

‘Get it, then.’

Like many of the most effective pieces of nature, the Belhaven woods aren’t natural at all. They were transplanted here in the late eighteenth century, planted to shield the house from any risk that it might be infringed upon by the rest of the world. Over the years, they have adapted the landscape to themselves, great mounds of springy golden loam beneath swooping silver trunks, roots wrapping round the ice house and the grotto so that when the walls finally crumbled, the caves remained. Belhaven Great House groans with the guilt of generations, but their woods are a dappled kindness of muffled birdsong and ancient secrets.

Harriet would know them blindfold. Children of great houses are often ignorant of the workings of the formal gardens, careless of frescoes and statuary and the delicate stitching of commemorative tapestry. But show them an outhouse, and they’ll show you where the servants used to carve their names, show them an attic and they’ll show you a priest’s hole, show them a wood and they’ll show you the grave of a favourite foxhound.

Harriet leads the two of us – Henry starts out on my shoulder, but soon plops down and stalks along with us, tail in the air, ears wobbling – confidently through the undergrowth, skirting hollows where chanterelles grow and rot unpicked on fallen logs, ducking beneath branches, hopping over scattered stones. I know where we’re heading, but have never approached it from this direction before. Harriet marches forward confidently, as though she were following a path. Perhaps she is, but it’s one that only she can see.

The weather has finally turned to full summer: I’ve been surprised on our drive, as those of us long-pent in cities often are, to see that the wheat fields are already turning, green giving way to gold and earth turned hard and red beneath the sun. We stroll in silence under trees heavy with the rush of new growth, skirt patches of bracken that play host to midge raves. I take off my jacket and sling it over my shoulder, grateful for the kiss of warm air upon my chilled skin.

Then I see the buttocks of a statue of Diana, her hunting bow slung gracefully over her shoulder, and I know where we are. A broad walk runs across our path, its middle divided by an old stone watercourse down which cool spring water trickles over cleansing moss. We make a right, head slightly downhill and come to the bathing pool. The haven.

It’s not large; certainly not a swimming pool. Circular, maybe three metres across all told, buried in the heart of the wood, surrounded by a lawn of moss and creeping thyme that crushes beneath the feet and fills the air with somnolent perfume, walls of rhododendron screening it from the rest of the world. I don’t think anyone has used it apart from us since the big pool was built in the old orangery back in the forties. In the spring the gardeners come down and drain it back, clear it of the previous autumn’s leaves, scrub down the grey stones that line it and reopen the watercourse that feeds it. And then they leave it to the murmur of blackbirds and the rustle of peaceful growth.

Henry, after a bit of sniffing and a couple of prowls, finds a stone bench in a shaft of sunlight and settles down to pretend to be a statue. Conserving energy for tonight’s violence, when he will deposit three adolescent rabbits and a thrush on the Kennels doorstep. We shed our clothes in the stone-built changing-hut sunk in the bank that hides the spot from the park, and, leaving them neatly piled on the floor, run starkers across the lawn and shallow-jump into the water. It is only five feet deep, but, shaded by trees, the water is cold enough to wrest a scream from my lungs as I surface. My nipples go bullet-like, like pink icing rosettes on a wedding cake. I flail, gasp and wait until my body adjusts. By the time it’s done so, Harriet is already gently backstroking from side to side, face to the sky, composed and relaxed. My heart stops hammering. I drop onto my back and frog lazily back and forth. ‘Aah,’ I say eventually.

Harriet, floating, raises her head. ‘Better?’

‘Mmm.’

She executes a lazy crawl over to one of the seats let into the wall, spreads her arms along the top, smiles.

‘I always feel better when I swim here,’ I say from the middle, bobbing.

‘I know,’ she replies. Squints up at the sun. ‘Everyone feels better when they swim here. It’s a known fact. I wish Gerald would come here occasionally: then he might not walk around like he’s got a stick up his arse the whole time.’

‘Takes a lot to wash a stick out of your arse,’ I say.

‘Yes, but you have to start somewhere.’

Then we don’t say anything for a bit. Henry does his long, thin sausage-cat thing, lets out a single yow and potters off into the bushes to bully the local insect life. Once he’s gone, a blackbird tentatively starts up a song. Harriet runs water down the length of her arms, watching the hairs rise and fall with the temperature changes. I just float, and feel free, tension lifting for the first time in weeks from my shoulders and arms, stretching calf-muscles that have been encased in lead.

‘You know,’ says Harriet, ‘they all hated her here. That’s the grand irony of all this fuss and niceness now, that they couldn’t find a nice word to say about her then.’

Godiva used to come down here as well, play at water-nymphs; that’s how Harriet developed the habit. I think she mostly only brought Harriet down here when boredom, or the cold shoulders of the family, drove her to find solace and entertainment in her daughter, but the place has that magical property of happy memory for Harriet nonetheless. While everyone else was mixing gin and tonics and waiting for the cubbing season to begin, Godiva and Harriet would be splashing blondely about in the pool, the odd ones out.

‘Even Daddy went sour once she’d left. I mean, I can’t blame him, what with the stuff she said and everything, but I get really angry with these people who pretend they were her friend now. I mean, it was as if my relationship to her didn’t exist. I guess that’s how it works with the Moresby blood: the incomers simply don’t matter. It was just extraordinary. She’d get up after lunch and say, “I’m going for a walk. Then you can all talk about me,” and the minute she left the room they’d start in.’

Harriet slips suddenly into the accent of her forebears: an accent so exaggerated that no cockney comedian would attempt it. ‘“I sumplih daren’t knare, Gerald,” they’d say, “wuh yer wur thinking abar.”’ Gerald was Harriet’s father’s name; the Moresbys have shown little by way of imagination in the last couple of hundred years. ‘Or, “Air
pleease
. Wut un
arth
does the thank she
lurks
like tuday?”’

Harriet grins. ‘I think the best one was Vif, when I was about twelve and she was about eighteen. Mummy had been down to visit and I was hiding on a window seat in the white drawing room, reading behind a curtain where they couldn’t find me because I didn’t want to say goodbye to her and I knew that the minute she went someone would come and try to make me go and do some exercise, so I don’t think she knew I was there. But she burst in with Aird – ’ Aird is Edward Sewell, a second cousin whom Vif married when she was twenty-five – ‘and they were laughing fit to bust. And you won’t believe what they were going on about.’

‘What?’ I’ve floated over to the wall and am lying with my chin on my hands.

Harriet starts to laugh. Half bitter, half entertained. ‘Aird goes, “Blurry ’all, earld gull. Did you
see
the size of thet dimund?” and Vif goes, “Air, I knair. End my
deah
, thet bairgas ecksunt.”’

I laugh. ‘How the hell did you manage not to end up like them?’ It’s always a wonder to me.

‘Because, thank God,’ says Harriet, ‘half of me doesn’t belong to them. Since she died, they’ve been busy covering up where she came from, pretending she was one of them, but she brought a bit of healthy blood into the family and that’s what I’ve got. I think I’m the first half-Moresby since the Industrial Revolution.’

We’re quiet again for a bit. I pluck some strands of moss and build a little pile by my hand. There’s a certain irony in the fact that the blood that saved Harriet from her hare-lipped fate should have come from someone with such obvious flaws of her own. But you know, maybe Harriet
did
get her ability to reinvent herself from her mother: after all, if anyone showed pluck and imagination on that score, it was Godiva.